Soon after Ginn & Co. rejected Peirce's "How to Reason"
(see previous selection), George A. Plimpton, a publisher in that
company, encouraged Peirce to write "a logic after the plan of
Jevons, not any larger than that," adding that, "as a
text-book, pure and simple, it would have a good sale" (Plimpton to
Peirce, 20 September 1894). About a year later, probably in the summer
of 1895, Peirce began composing the smaller book, which he titled
"Short Logic." "Of Reasoning in General" is the
first and only chapter he wrote for that book. He sent it for comments
to William James, Josiah Royce, and Francis E. Abbot. The latter
responded that it was a "masterly piece of work," an opinion
Peirce echoed later to his friend Francis Russell by saying it was his
"best statement" of his division of signs into Icons, Indices,
and Symbols, "other things in this paper [being] slurred over in
order to bring this point into prominence" (L387:192, c. 10 March
1896).

Peirce may have abandoned the book for lack of actual publishing
support. In July 1895 he told William James that he was "going to
send Royce a chapter of a logica short onewhich I dont quite dispair
yet of publishing. I dont expect any returns, but it is possible it may
be printed" [sic] (30 July 1895). A few weeks later he wrote his
friend Russell that "I expect in a few days to sign a contract for
the publication of a schoolbook which is expected to bring in some
income for a good many years" (L387:145, 20 September 1895). But
Ginn & Co. turned Peirce's down.

The chapter is divided into 13 articles. Of Article 9, which presents a
long discussion of certain logico-grammatical features of the Egyptian
and other languages, only the first and last paragraphs are presented in
the EP2 text.